The challenges of bootstrapping a mobile app as a single female founder in Lebanon

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This piece is part of a new series on the
challenges of young entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their
startups. If you know someone who's overcoming a major challenge
while getting off the ground, let us know.

After working through some major challenges, Lebanese
entrepreneur Alia Khatib recently launched Feeditch, a new mobile app designed
to serve the Arab world’s foodies. The app acts as a mobile
taste-tester, allowing users to discover and review specific meals
at restaurants across the Middle East.

Khatib first dreamed up the project while living in Dubai and
working at a distribution company after graduating with a degree in
marketing. When looking to go out at night, she found it difficult
to trust the few restaurant review sites available at the time,
particularly when wanting to try different ethnic cuisines. She
decided that she could do it better.

“I was learning [in Dubai], but then
the learning curve stopped at one point and I wanted to try and go
to another company. But then I thought ‘since I’m young, why don’t
I start now’… because later when you get older you can’t make
sacrifices for starting your own business as easily,” says
Khatib.

Finally, after two years in the UAE,
she left her job and returned to Lebanon in 2011 to try her hand at
her own startup. “Then when I came here, I was doing research and a
new restaurant would open and everyone was talking about it, but
the food wasn’t that great. So you end up realizing you tried the
wrong thing,” says Khatib.

Feeditch hopes to change that.

The app, which is now in beta, is
photo-based and is actually very simple. Available only in Arabic
on
iOS, Feeditch gives users the ability to “itch” for new cuisine
and specific plates that they’d like to try and then recommend
meals via photo capture and brief comments (perhaps the name sounds
a bit weird until you realize how the app uses "itch"). The app
displays specific restaurant profiles, taken from Foursquare, and
compiles these crowdsourced reviews for specific menu items. As you
walk through the city, the app updates to let you know the
highest-rated meals closest to you.

So far, Khatib has seen a decent
1,600 downloads after officially launching in late July; 36% from
Saudi Arabia, 31% from her native Lebanon, 18% in the UAE, and the
rest divided up among other countries in the region.

Currently, the app isn’t making
money; Khatib hopes first to build a loyal user base and body of
content. Once the app gains more traction, however, she plans to
monetize by offering specific restaurant deals and discounts,
letting users see the highest-rated offers closest to them in real
time.

Finding a
niche

The idea for Feeditch isn't new; other startups
like Foodspotting offer
a similar service in English, and Khatib had initially built the
application in English to be an iteration of that
model.

Yet at Wamda’s first Mix N’ Mentor
Beirut last year, one of Khatib’s mentors pushed her to find a
way to differentiate and find a niche that could engage customer
demand. She decided that Arabic was it; no other Arabic-only mobile
food review app exists to date.

A few local apps, like Lebanon's Beirutna,
offer food reviews in English for a local audience, but Feeditch is
designed to be regional. Others, like Jeeran, have gone regional,
but don't necessarily focus on meals or food items alone (although
this was something Laith Zraikat was playing with, with
Olgot).

“I thought, ‘why would anyone use Feeditch?’ There’s
Instagram, Foursquare, Foodspotting, so why don’t I find a niche
and pivot into the Arabic community?” Without an Arabic
interface, Khatib explains, Foodspotting only has a handful of
users in the Arab world.

The challenges of launching a startup
alone

Recent studies have shown that women are more likely to found companies on their own,
and Khatib is no exception. Yet, it's been a stumbling block for
her. Because she's not a developer, she's had to hunt down
technical talent to build the platform.

In 2011, she hired an Indian developer to build the first,
English-only platform. Once she decided to redesign, she hired
a developer in Dubai to rebuild the app in Arabic, and launched in
beta this July. But that developer is already moving on to other
projects, so now Khatib is looking for a new one, possibly from
Jordan, to push forward.

Of course, chasing freelancers isn't a sustainable long-term
solution; her biggest hope is to find a technical
co-founder.

It's also been one of her biggest
challenges; when Khatib applied to SeedStartup in Dubai, she
laments, “One of the main reasons I couldn’t join was because I
didn’t have a technical cofounder.”

Now this reality is affecting her
search for investment. To date, she’s been self-funding the
project, but admits that she needs a new funding source by year’s
end. For that, she continues to apply to local and regional startup
incubators and competitions.

“One of my biggest regrets is that I
didn’t apply to competitions early on,” says Khatib. “Don’t go for
funding, go for competitions. Even if you fail once or twice, keep
applying because at each competition, different people see your
business plan and develop your idea.”

Moving
forward

Without a technical cofounder and
funding, Khatib has hit a wall. She's certainly not the first to
meet this challenge, but it's a tough one and one that other
aspiring entrepreneurs shouldn't underestimate.

It's also particularly challenging to find a cofounder who is
willing to join for an equity percentage, especially when the
startup- in this case Feeditch- isn’t yet making money. But Khatib
is pushing on anyway, hopeful that she will find a cofounder who's
as passionate as she is, or get accepted into an incubator in
the region to keep her idea going.

She’s currently and applicant to the Oasis500 bootcamp and, most
recently, Feeditch was chosen as one of 22 semi-finalists at the
Webit Congress Startup Challenge, where Khatib will have the
opportunity to travel to Istanbul to showcase her app and pitch her
startup to potential investors or partners.

In the short term, the app will soon
be available on Android, and in English, for expats or those who
may not jump to Arabic first; she's decided to cater to both
audiences after all.

What have been some of your major
challenges to bootstrapping? How important is having a team to
building your startup? Let us know in the comments section
below.